Local campaigners feel they are being "kept at arm's length" during ministerial deliberations over the future of Alton's Lord Mayor Treloar Hospital.
According to Treloar Project Group chairman Luath Grant Ferguson, the promised "scoping study", welcomed as a way of investigating the situation in full, has actually excluded Treloar from the equation and will look only at existing district hospital sites.
A full version of this story can be found in the Alton Herald of October 20, 2000.